JD Vance with Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, last Saturday. Photo: AP
The running mate of a candidate, be it presidential or prime ministerial, generally doesn’t carry much weight with the public.
The deputy, in the public’s mind, is the person on the interchange bench who comes on to the political field when the leader is otherwise engaged, on holidays, sick or overseas. It’s important, of course, to have one, but in the perceptions of the masses, not that important.
And the deputy is almost never the anointed one. Almost, because in the extraordinary circumstances that defines US politics nowadays, we have now seen an exception with the stepping down of Joe Biden to run for the next election and his deputy Kamala Harris, now the anointed one.
Recently in the US, however, the axis has shifted. Donald Trump has named a man called JD Vance to be his vice-president if he wins office.
Vance shot to notice with the publication of his memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” in 2016. It quickly became a bestseller. “Essential reading”, said The New York Times. Vance admits in the introduction to be embarrassed by it being called a memoir. He was only in his early 30s.
But in his depiction of his growing up in the back hills of America, in the hollowed-out communities of blue-collar workers who are without a voice, and the devastation done to huge swathes of America through the changing mechanisms of economics, he struck a chord.
Vance was also something of a rarity; he graduated from Yale University and has become a highly successful businessman, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Elon Musk. He was in the Marines, served in Iraq, and became a venture capitalist.
He has also embodied one of the wildest swings in political views in modern times. When Trump was running for president in 2016, Vance was fiercely against him. He viewed Trump as possibly becoming “America’s Hitler”. In that year, he called Trump “cultural heroin”, and said he was taking “the white working class to a very dark place”.
“Trump makes people I care about afraid. Immigrants, Muslims, etc. Because of this I find him reprehensible,” declared the “never-Trump” guy.
Last week, Vance became Trump’s running mate for the White House. His conversion is possibly one of the most dramatic of any seen in politics. One year, Trump is an “idiot”, a few years later, apparently not. Was it an enlightened change of mind? A meeting of like minds when they did get to know each other? And, more worryingly, are they now the builders of America’s new weathervane?
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Paradoxically, when Trump lost the 2020 election and the insurrection following the loss occurred, urged on by Trump, with its echoes of Hitlerian power grabs, Vance was on the Trump train.
If he had been vice-president then, says Vance, he would have stood strong with Trump. He said Trump had a “very legitimate grievance”. This goes against the judgments and views of the courts, the law enforcement agencies and the electoral institutions that the result was not a fraud. Trump lost. And yet a virulent toxic strain runs through Trump, now Vance and their followers, that it was all a con.
Vance’s deep conservatism, and his relative youth at under 40, will be a strength for the Trump campaign. Suddenly, the one-man show of Trumpism is now a movement. He is in accord, generally, with Trump on climate change denialism, immigration and keeping out of wars (that one presumes don’t benefit America’s political and corporate interests). So goodbye Ukraine. Indeed, Vance has said so explicitly. “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.”
Vance is being described as MAGA-mini. And like Trump, it seems he is not above feeding the masses with the dream of how making America great again will work, which is, in effect, all who are not my friends are my enemies.
For instance, of the assassination attempt on Trump, he drew a link with the Biden campaign, in that it had portrayed Trump as “an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs”. Hence, he said, the assassination attempt.
The non-profit news organisation ProPublica, in a recent profile of Vance, reported that Vance had supported the views of InfoWars founder conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.
In a democracy, anyone can change their views on anything. But it carries more heft, of course, if the view is changed because the facts have changed. As the quote commonly attributed to famed economist John Maynard Keynes goes: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”
But such is the kaleidoscopic nightmare that is American politics, the true light of fact versus the shadow world of fiction is in constant battle. One effect of this is that, in the end, people believe what they want to believe.
“I believe the devil is real and that he works terrible things in our society. That’s a crazy conspiracy theory to a lot of very well-educated people in this country right now.”
That’s JD Vance, in 2021.
